After the Department of War sent a reassignment order directly to one of his subordinates, in April 1817 Andrew jackson issued a mandate that all orders to officers in the southern division of the United States Army be routed through him as commanding general. The resulting public accusations of insubordination caused Jackson to consider retiring from the service. President Monroe placated him with a letter of 2 Dec. 1817 proposing that executive orders normally be passed through division commanders and, when this was not practicable, a copy be sent to them concurrently. Jackson accepted the compromise later that month (Jackson, Papers description begins Sam B. Smith, Harold D. Moser, Daniel Feller, and others, eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 1980– , 9 vols. description ends , 4:112–4, 155–6, 162).

On 2 Dec. 1817 Monroe also delivered his annual message to Congress, in which he announced plans to suppress the unauthorized establishments recently made at amelia island and Galveston (galvestown). Although these outposts claimed to be harboring Spanish colonial revolutionaries, Monroe concluded that their main activities were smuggling African slaves and other contraband (Annals description begins Annals of the Congress of the United States: The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States … Compiled from Authentic Materials, Washington, D.C., Gales & Seaton, 1834–56, 42 vols. (All editions are undependable and pagination varies from one printing to another. Citations given below are to the edition mounted on the American Memory website of the Library of Congress and give the date of the debate as well as page numbers.) description ends , 15th Cong., 1st sess., 14).

The diplomatic agent from Buenos Aires to the United States was Manuel Hermenejildo de Aguirre.